“When the Zionists decided to found an independent Jewish state on Palestinian territory, one of the first problems they faced was the small size of the Jewish population living there. In the early 1900s, Jews constituted less than 10 percent of the population of Palestine.Thanks to the efforts of the Zionists, the number of Jewish migrants, 100,000 in the 1920s, reached 232,000 in the 1930s according to official figures. By 1939 there were 445,000 Jews out of a total population of 1.5 million. From representing 10 percent of the population just two decades before, they now constituted 30 percent by 1939. Jewish settlement areas were also expanded in line with the rise in population. By 1939 the land owned by Jews had doubled in comparison to the 1920s. By 1947, there were 630,000 Jews in Palestine and 1.3 million Palestinians. Between the partitioning of Palestine by the United Nations on November 29, 1947 and the founding of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948, the Israelis acquired a substantial part of Palestinian lands. As a result of pressure and killing in Palestinian villages, the number of Palestinians living in some 500 cities, towns and villages fell from 950,000 to 138,000. A great number of these people had been killed, and others were exiled. The Zionist terror groups that would later form the Israeli Army attacked Muslim villages at night. Muslims were shot, and everywhere these groups passed through was burned and destroyed. By these means, some 400 Palestinian villages were wiped off the map in 1948 and 1949. The property left behind by the Palestinians was taken over by the Jews by virtue of the Absentee Property Law. Until 1947, Jewish land ownership in Palestine was some 6%. By the time the state was formally established, it had sequestered 90% of the land.9 The Palestinian Arabs were left with just two separate areas, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.http://www.harunyahya.com/spring04.php